The Amusing Paranoia Of The American Right

If the pre-emptive howling at The Corner -- the Intertoobz presence belonging to the longtime (and startlingly advertising-free) white-supremacist journal National Review -- is any indication, the public intellectuals of the American right are going to put on an epic clown show in response to whatever the president says tonight. They're buckling up the knee-breeches on their Thomas Paine starter kits and readying themselves for the ominous knock on the door late tonight, which they will think is tyranny come to call, but which is really the guy with the pizza. Kevin Williamson bats leadoff, andhe's had all he can stand of the national capital's imperial pretensions and he can't stands no more, finding himself longing for the days of the yeoman farmer, because if there's one thing that American conservatism has been in the past 35 years, it's been a sturdy bulwark against royalism of all kinds.

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When the moment comes and the sergeant-at-arms utters the sacred words - "Mr. Speaker! The president of the United States!" - the chamber will erupt, as though the assembled have entirely forgotten that the mysterious entity that is the object of this curious act of national worship only a decade ago was an obscure legislator in a destitute and corrupt state, a man whose most prominent legislative accomplishment was the passage of a bill requiring police to videotape confessions in potential capital cases - in a state in which there were as a practical matter no potential capital cases. (Illinois had not carried out an execution during the century in which the law was passed and was on its way toward abolishing capital punishment categorically.)

Of course, subsequent to that, he was elected president of the United States. Twice. A decade before his predecessor gave his second State of the Union address, he was a half-drunk legacy failure who'd cratered several businesses and challenged his father to a fistfight on the front lawn of the manse. I don't recall any conservatives baying about the imperial trappings of his speech. Folks do change, after all.

Williamson, at least, seems to find something funny in it. Not so our old friend,Sub Left'nant Blimp, who has mounted the barricades before everyone else, and seems baffled as to why the old ladies at the bus stop across the street are pointing at him and laughing.

"Mr. Obama," yesterday's Wall Street Journal tells us, "will emphasize his intention to use unilateral presidential authority - bypassing Congress when necessary - to an extent not seen in his previous State of the Union speeches." If it wishes to preserve the integrity of the American settlement, Congress must push back - and hard. There is a solid reason why previous State of the Union speeches have not featured declarations of "universal presidential authority," and that is that such declarations are rotten, unseemly, and insulting to the republican ideal.

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Nice. The WSJ -- which, while it was steadily going insane in the 1980s, saw nothing amiss in the unilateral presidential authority to run foreign policy out of the White House basement and to sell missiles to the mullahs -- invents a category and then the Sub Left'Nant demands that the president not conform to it.

Cast your minds back, if you will, to last year's proposed Syrian intervention, during which Obama consistently argued that Congress's role in matters of war and peace was little more than that of a Bureau of Friendly Advice - useful in a pinch, but without any binding power. Even when he was rebuffed by lawmakers of both parties and by a supermajority of the public, the request for permission came couched in the patois of condescension: "While I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action without specific congressional authorization," the president granted, with palpable irritation, "I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective."

The "patois of condescension"? From this cluck? Lack of self-awareness is not just a river in Egypt. Anyway, by this standard, every president of my lifetime -- including the two Bushes and, of course, Ronald Reagan -- has been a tyrant, including old Ike, who at least seemed to have some qualms about it at the end. If that's the argument the Sub Left'Nant wants to make, he should make it, but I don't think that's where we're going.

Nope.

Arguing that "we've seen an unprecedented pattern of obstruction in Congress that's prevented too much of the American people's business from getting done," Obama channeled his inner James II, pretending that Congress enjoyed only the power to block legislation that didn't meet his subjective standard of "importance." Later, he claimed that "ultimately, if you got a majority of folks who believe in something, then it should be able to pass," which, although relatively benign in this particular instance, is a dangerous, repugnant theory that could be used as an excuse to undermine almost every part of the American constitutional settlement.

But this gathering of tinfoil tricorns would be incomplete without a contribution from Victor Davis Miles Gloriosus Hanson, the Stuttering John of the Classics department, who sends out some sentence-like combinations of words from his treehouse, and demonstrates that he doesn't get out as much as he should.

We are reentering Nixonian times, or perhaps worse, given that a free press at least went after Nixon's misdeeds and misadventures. Now it has silenced itself for fear of harming a once-in-century chance for a fellow progressive's makeover of America.

Nixon committed serious crimes. He then committed serious crimes to cover up the previous serious crimes. This isn't hard. You canlisten to him do it. Whatcha got, Vic?

Oh, Christ.

Without the media acting as a watchdog, the administration has with impunity found the IRS useful in going after political opponents.

Lie.

(This, by the way, is what using the IRS with impunity actually sounds like: President Nixon: I can only hope that we are, frankly, doing a little persecuting. Right? We ought to persecute them [unclear] we can; Ehrlichman: That's right; President Nixon: And on the IRS, if you could-are we looking into [Senator Edmund] Muskie's [D-Maine] returns? Does he have any? [Senator] Hubert's [Humphrey, D-Minnesota] been in a lot of funny deals; Ehrlichman: Yes, he has. September 8, 1971.)

When Obama's IRS appointees were exposed, he for the moment called their deeds outrageous; when the media did not pursue the outrage, he wrote it off as a nothing story.

It wasn't nothing. It was inexcusable bipartisan dumbassery from an overworked and understaffed agency that made for brief delays in the efforts of political grifters to dive through an equally inexcusable loophole. And, inevitably, we arrive at...

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All we know for now about Benghazi is that everything the administration alleged about the murders was false - from why Americans were there, to what prompted the violence, to why no help was sent before or during the attack, to the aftermath promises to hunt down the perpetrators.

Actually,the rest of us knowa lot more about it, but perhaps the news has not yet penetrated the forest primeval, where new flowers of paranoia bloom lushly.

He did, though, make a movie critical of Barack Obama, and this is most likely what brought him under administration scrutiny, as did the activities of a video maker arrested for producing a politically incorrect video about Islam, or those of unduly audited Tea Party groups or Hollywood conservatives who have criticized the president. All of that, in this age of pen and phone, can get you arrested, audited, or on the IRS watch list.

Free Dinesh!

Under Obama, who you are and what you represent rather than what you have done are becoming the selective criteria for pen-and-phone legal enforcement. For the first time since 1974, America is no longer quite a lawful place.

And, tonight, he's might raise the pay of federal workers. Lay in the canned goods and fire up the shortwave, mother.

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